Have you ever wondered how to design a data center storage?

Have you ever wondered how to design a data center storage? First, you need a storage solution. It can be a Ceph cluster, dedicated server, or in my case, a storage array. Storage arrays are super cool and they have tons of redundancy built in, like multipathing support and duplicate controllers. Then, you need to decide on your transfer protocol. You've probably heard about iSCSI, but I'm a big Fiber Channel advocate. Fiber Channel requires dedicated switches and SFPs, but that's actually a big plus. Unless you are very constrained, you always want to separate your data and storage networks. With Fiber Channel, you do that automatically, and your switches are designed to do the one and only thing and they do it really well. You want the switches to work in a redundant stack, therefore you always want at least two. All that's left to do is to connect your server with FC cards, the FC switches, configure access policies and configure multipathing. For HPC and AI, it's a whole different story.